Putting an end to the speculations, Microsoft has announced that Satya Nadella will be the 3rd CEO of the company succeeding Steve Ballmer.

Satya, born in Hyderabad, India is 46 years old and feels honored, humbled and excited with his new role. He has spent 22 years at Microsoft and feels that Microsoft has talent, resources and perseverance – everything that is required for a company to change the world.

This may not be the most important news and may never be really advertised but this is something that impressed me quite a lot about Windows 8. This time around Microsoft is actually improving the most basic things that affect your day to day computer usage.

Every geeky Windows user I know uses something like TeraCopy or FastCopy to manage big file copy operations in Windows. These plug-ins provide you more control and a better UI and are especially helpful in copying large file in between devices. The good news is that Microsoft themselves is building some of this functionality into the OS so it is available to everyone.

Now all the copy operations are combined and showed in a single window.You don’t have to Alt-Tab and reach the right progress dialog box when you are copying multiple files. In addition to this, every operation has a pause button associated with it. If you are copying 2 things in parallel, pausing one will obviously finish up the other one faster.

People have always had wondered whether letting Google read your personal email so they can show ads based on the content is a good idea. If you have had similar doubts Microsoft is hoping to escalate them to new levels using their new Office 365 campaign.

Isaac Asimov developed the 3 Laws of Robotics for nothing. This video is a proof of what could happen when an unsuspecting software programmer develops a self-aware computer program that’s connected to the internet (has wealth of information) eventually moves on to destroying the world.

I’ll leave saving the day to John Connor, while you enjoy this humorous video in which an XBOX Kinect programmed to be self-aware evaluates that it’s creator (the developer) is worthless to eliminate him and hacks into the US Govt’s database to steal the launch codes and eventually uses the nukes to destroy the world.

Ever heard of Zune? Its Microsoft’s MP3 player. No, not Microsoft’s iPod, MP3 player. And one that sucks big time. To prove how much it sucks, might I quote that it was awarded one of the ugliest product in tech history by PC world in addition to only having around 1% of market share (compared to 77% of Apple’s iPod).

Microsoft has been trying hard to keep Zune alive for years now. However, all their attempts have failed.

Finally, according to Bloomberg, Microsoft is pulling the plug for Zune. They will not be releasing any new models now and will continue selling the existing version only.

Ever thought what will happen if you install Windows 1.0 and then upgrade it through the series of Windows releases right upto Windows 7? If you asked me before, I’d say it just won’t work. But actually, it does!

TheRasteri did the same and uploaded the video of the experiment on YouTube. One of the surprising discoveries was that the lots of settings were maintained right from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7!

Microsoft is advertising their Bing app that pretty much seems to do everything. What’s surprising is that the video shows the Bing app running on an iPhone and not a Windows 7 Phone. What’s even more surprising is that the iPhone app seems to have more features than the Android, Blackberry or Windows Phone version of the app.

I hate the advertisement but the app looks pretty darn good! Microsoft doesn’t sound so bad these days. Something is definitely not right.